Times change

 When my mom dug up that vodka flask that I mentioned in an earlier post, she also found some other old stuff that she had long forgotten about.  I was intrigued by her collection of buttons or pins or whatever you would call them, kind of bumper stickers for your clothes.  She said she had an old Wrangler blue jean jacket covered with them when she was a teen.  I particularly liked these three, as I'd never thought of mom as a hippie chick and peacenik.  She insists she was not but was anti-Viet Nam war in the same fashion as the America First members who opposed American entry into World War II, most famous among them Charles Lindbergh, who got labeled a traitor and Nazi sympathizer for wanting us to stay out of Europe's eternal squabbles.  But Lindbergh was lucky.  John F. Kennedy was a member of America First, too, and look what they did to him.  Okay, okay, I don't really know if there is any connection with his pre-Pearl Harbor political beliefs and what happened almost a quarter of a century later.  Probably not.  But what do I know?

The attempts to delegitimize and denigrate not only the opinions but the personal reputations and livelihoods of those who opposed the foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration were called "brown smearing," a rather disgusting name.   The Wilson administration had done something very similar a generation earlier against those who opposed US entry into the so-called Great War.  In contrast, the members of the Anti-Imperialist League, an organization of prominent Americans who opposed the Spanish-American war, and in particular the Philippine acquisition, didn't really suffer any attacks by the government.  In those days, freedom of expression was still an honored principle, so such men as Mark Twain and poet Edgar Lee Masters could pursue their opposition without risk to their livelihoods and reputations.  In The Philippine Insurrection, Masters wrote that, "The Philippine aggression was the repudiation of the fundamental principles of the republic,  coupled with the injustice being perpetrated against a helpless people.”  Despite his and Twain's vociferous opposition to Washington's newfound enthusiasm for imperial conquest, both remained respected and admired and the federal government made no effort to smear or silence them.  Today, however....